Ground Zero

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Ground Zero
Five days after the attack
Bob Kaufman Bkaufman_at_tdicapital.com 646-486-0030
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For a several block radius from the crash site,
storefronts were blasted out, streetlamps blown
down, and cars buried under inches of gray
concrete dust. Fluorescent orange spray-paint
marked which buildings had been searched and how
many victims found. Morgue, 2 Blocks was
spray-painted on the front entrance to Brooks
Brothers. It seemed very out of place. Looking
through the broken out display windows, you could
see neatly-arranged shelves of button-down shirts
coated in thick gray silt. Dumpster-sized wooden
boxes, labeled aircraft parts, were placed
every block or so.
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Yael stopped for a picture in front of the
Millenium Hilton. We would soon discover it fared
far better than other neighborhood hotels.
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Office papers and fragments of desks and chairs
littered the streets as we neared Ground Zero. A
street vendor cart lay abandoned, its doughnuts
and sandwiches spilled across the windows and
floor. There was an flattened fire truck lying
upside down, an ambulance that had been amputated
in half by a falling beam, and a passenger car
crushed open, revealing a full set of golf clubs
in the trunk.
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The area was considered a crime scene, so we
werent supposed to disturb anything. But my
curiosity got the best of me. I picked up a
sheet that landed ominously in a cemetery across
from 6 WTC. It was the lease between Cantor
Fitzgerald and its subtenant, eSpeed, on the
103rd floor. When the second plane struck, their
escape route was sealed off by the fire.
1500 children of Cantor employees lost a parent.
I later attended a Memorial Service for someone I
knew. At the conclusion, the family gave us an
envelope with 2 sheets of blank paper and the
below note.

• Please Tell us about our father
• Please send us a note telling us something about
  our father.
• His special characteristics
• A favorite story about our father
• What you remember most about our father
  Maybe even send us a picture
• My mother will save these for us, and someday it
  will allow us to know more about our Daddy.
• Who knows it may even be a bedtime story.
• Hannah, Lucy and Henry

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The first WTC building we saw was 7. Once 47
stories, it was now a 60-foot high mound. I was
told it fell later everyone was evacuated. An
abandoned street vendor cart stood in front.
Multiple high pressure hoses were spraying it
down to suppress underground fires that would
continue for weeks. It reminded me of coal seams
Ive seen burning in mountainsides for years.
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Approaching WTC 2, I was struck with how much
damage had been done to other buildings in the
area. Windows, even 15 and 20 floors up, blew
out. A shard of the Trade Center weighing many
tons hung from a nearby building.
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Arriving at 2 WTC, Yael jumped onto the bucket
brigade. For hours, she passed five-gallon
buckets of debris down the line. It gratified her
to be able to support the effort in some tangible
way. The intense, fast-moving, assembly-line
rhythm offered an escape from the awful reality
of the job.
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A surveyor trained a spotting scope on the corner
of what appeared to be a crushed three-story
structure. It was all that remained of the
45-story Marriott. He explained, My job is
simple. You see that leaning building? Every two
minutes I sight in on it. The second I see
movement, I fire off this siren to clear the
workers away.
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Then, every hour or so, the All Quiet call
would ring across the job site as someone
suspected they heard tapping. The beehive of
activity would grind to a halt. People would
almost stop breathing, shut off their power
tools, kill the engines on their front-end
loaders, and listen for sounds of life. Each
time, after several disappointing minutes of
silence, rather than finding a live survivor, a
call would come out to pass more body bags down
the line.
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My surveyor friend thought that digging out the
rubble by hand undermined the pile, increasing
the risk that large pieces could collapse on the
rescue workers. He also thought there might be
pockets of life buried deep that the bucket
brigade would not reach in time. He thought
cranes should have been brought in sooner to lift
heavy pieces off the top. But the firefighters
didnt want to risk maiming any of the 350
firefighters and emergency response professionals
who might be buried near the surface.
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Fireman had to cut the twisted metal skin of the
Trade Center into smaller pieces so the cranes
could lift them. They also had to remove hanging
objects before people could work underneath them.
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I saw a cable that had been lashed high onto what
remained of WTC 2. I later heard they tried to
drag it down using a crane. But it was too solid.
An experienced welder complained to me that a
local union crew had taken over the welding
equipment he was using. He thought they were
getting paid which upset him I belong to a
union, but Im not here for money. He was
frustrated watching an inexperienced union welder
take ten minutes to cut through a beam he said he
could slice through in two minuteswhile
potential survivors might be buried beneath.
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I wandered far out onto the pile with a welding
crew. I shoveled surface debris away so they
could weld bare metal. The mishmash of burnt
paper, shattered concrete, splintered office
furniture, and jagged metal objects was so
compacted that it took 3-4 stabs each time to get
my shovel under the surface.
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As darkness fell and the wind picked up, the
scene felt more ominous. I looked across a deep
pit to all that remained of 2 WTC, a charred and
twisted skeleton of metal beams rising 15 stories
above the wreckage. You could see right through
gaps in the skin of the building frame into
smoldering fires that seemed to glow a brighter
orange with the onset of darkness. After four
days, I wondered what could still be burning.
In the distance, I could hear metal shifting and
creaking. Every now and then, a piece of dangling
rebar would fall and clang onto the pile. You
couldnt see it you could only hear it. It rang
with the sound of death. Few rescuers, if any,
had trespassed that deep into the remnants of 2
WTC. I couldnt get myself to go nearer for fear
that something would fall on me, and I might
become trapped.
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Yet I knew that, if there were still survivors,
they were likely pinned inside that remnant of
WTC 2. A fireman told me 500-1000 might be buried
thereless than half a football field from where
we stood. I wished there were more I could do to
help. I think that was probably every rescue
workers feeling. Judging from my limited
exposure, working on the rescue was probably more
cathartic for us rescuers than it was effective
for those we were hoping to save. Part of the
problem, according to one fireman, was that New
York had lost 70 of their 200 best rescuers,
their top chiefs, much of their rescue equipment,
and the emergency response center when the towers
collapsed. In the lower center, you might be able
to see a crater 30 feet below street level where
the Promenade used to be.
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I ran into a canine team from Indiana. Kaiser,
the search dog, was spooked from walking on hot
metal beams. Trained in back country search in
Indiana, he was clearly uncomfortable walking on
a mountain of metal (note his bandaged foot), in
downtown Manhattan, at night.
Four days after the collapse, heat and smoke
still wafted up through the carnage. The stench
of burning building material was sickening to me
wearing a respirator mask I can only imagine how
pungent it was to the animal with his keen nose.
When Kaiser thought he smelled someone, he would
bark. Then, another dog would be brought in to
confirm the canine hit before the bucket
brigaders would hand-dig on the spot.
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I was impressed with how able the dogs were to
climb up and over beams. I dont know how much
each beam weighed, but I do know that five of us
could stand on one without budging it. It was
hard to fathom the forces a single falling beam
would subject on the human body, let alone a
floors worthor a buildings worth.
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Part of the 8th floor of Deutsche Bank landed,
strangely enough, 15 feet below the beams we were
traversing across. I didnt climb down, but I was
told that one office was eerily still intact, its
desks and chairs thrown into the corner. While
the rubble covered several square blocks, it was
hard to believe it rose only 60 feet above street
level. 110 stories of skyscraper had compressed
into the basement! The dogs led us to a tangle of
beams with cracks just wide enough to slip
through. A fireman crawled down with his shovel.
A few minutes later, he found two victims. We
passed him body bags which you can see him
holding under his arm.
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Union Square
The weekend after the attack
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The next day, Yael and I went over to Union
Square. As intense as the destruction at the
Towers, was the camaraderie of strangers and the
outpouring of love and support at Union Square
and all around New York.
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Thousands of people placed candles, flowers,
teddy bears, and even paintings around the
Square. People were mostly silent as they perused
the hundreds of missing posters taped to walls
and fences. Many made reference to scars,
tattoos, or jewelry their loved ones were wearing
when last seen.
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Yael brought me over to see an email taped to the
pavement called Tons. It spoke about the
emptiness of the medias reporting on dry
statistics.
Of all the prayers I read, the ones written by
school-children touched me most.
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All the diversity of New York seemed to be
present. A group of Tibetans several hundred
strong meditated, burned incense candles, hung
prayer flags, and chanted, praying for
non-violence. Mexicans marched and sang in the
streets, waving Mexican and American flags. It
seemed as if the whole world had come together to
share the pain and incomprehensibility of what
had happened.
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Looking into the eyes of those who perished hit
me with the magnitude of the loss. They were all
just normal people it could have happened to any
of us.
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The melting pot of America came together in Union
Square to grieve. Strangers felt a common pain
and connection. It was a living example of what
is so precious about America. While we differ on
some things, all of us gathered there agreed on
the sacredness of life and the unspeakable loss
of September 11. How to respond to
such acts is the vexing question. Its hard for
me to comprehend how humans could do this to each
other. Seeing pictures of those killed and the
pain of those left behind, I certainly felt the
urge for compassion, forgivenessanything that
could end the cycle of killing. But I question
whether it could ever be possible to reach the
hearts of those hateful enough to inflict such
loss and suffering on others. That makes me feel
an urge for justice. I suppose this is the same
issue the religions of the world have been
grappling with through thousands of years of
human history.
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I went to Yaels Temple the following Tuesday for
Rosh Hashonah in Long Island. In his sermon,
Rabbi Michael White said the following The
thing about human evil is that whenever it goes
toe-to-toe with human goodness, it always loses.
Of course, in the short-term, monstrous madness
wreaks havoc and can cause immeasurable pain, as
it most certainly did this past week. But, in the
end, the human spirit is so much stronger than
the forces which would destroy it.